STEVE JAMES: Yeah, there’s all kind of production stuff going on now that they didn’t do in documentaries before. I think documentary has always had quite a range of approaches, but I think it’s exploded. There are personal films, there are essay films, and there are these analytical films, like Why We Fight, which was at Sundance this year. There’s quite a spectrum of approaches now of documentary, that are perceived as ok, possibly entertaining, and commercial. It’s pretty amazing.

CHRIS NEUMER: As soon as Hans Zimmer does the score to the documentary of his past, it’ll reach another milestone.

STEVE JAMES: Exactly.

CHRIS NEUMER: Is there anything else you want to add? Anything else you particularly want to get out there, anything like that?

STEVE JAMES: I don’t know…

CHRIS NEUMER: Otherwise, I just have one minor thing that doesn’t have to do with anything. I was thinking about this in terms of, you did the pre-con thing, and I had this idea, and I don’t know how it would work, but I had this idea where the first half hour of the movie would be an honest to god picture, like a biopic of somebody’s life, take Jim Carrey. It would be about Jim Carrey, and Jim Carrey would play Jim Carrey. Then about a half hour into the movie, you’d hit present day, and they’d show Jim Carrey working on this biopic about Jim Carrey. Then, as soon as the movie would end, then you’d be into the future, you could have these other things, like how other biopics are made, and an older Jim Carrey standing around, saying "What’s going on? This isn’t what I thought." I thought this would be very interesting — Charlie Kaufman would have to write it, because it’s giving me a headache just trying to explain it.

STEVE JAMES: I was just going to say, it sounds like something he would do.

CHRIS NEUMER: But I’ve had this idea just in the back of my head for a long time. I think it would be hysterical. I think seven people would see it, I think seven people would love it, but I think it would be absolutely hysterical if you could get the right guy doing it. So then I started thinking about how you could apply this to documentary film making, and I thought, what about a guy making a documentary about they very guy who’s making the documentary? And then, and this is the point where you’re going to start to wonder how much weed I was smoking, this is pure sober right here, and I thought, wow, that would be bazaar, how would you make a documentary about a guy making a documentary? And then I started thinking about putting specifics, like a documentary about you making Hoop Dreams, and then, it reminded me of this movie called Where's Marlowe? which was a very small film that came out five years ago; Mos Def was in it too. It started out as a documentary, the guys doing the camera operator and the sound guy started getting involved in it because of the fact that they were filming it. Then someone else started filming them, and I thought to myself, "What is the next frontier of documentary filmmaking?" Is it something like this, just crazy, where you’re documenting some guy making a documentary? Is it something where it’s just blatantly commercial, like the history of the world’s most famous porn star, they actually did that with Ron Jeremy, but where does documentary go from here?

STEVE JAMES: Well, I don’t know, I mean, that kind of Paul Revere, self-reflective stuff, I’m sure someone will, or has, done something like that, but I don’t think it would constitute a big trend. Experimental film, for decades, has been as much about the making of itself as whatever subject might be in front of the camera. So, it’s just not something that’s been in the mainstream. I think that the more preoccupied with the media we become, and media conscious we become, and saturated, certainly that has, and will continue, to find its way into the making of documentaries. That’s why I think there’ll be decades where there are probably more personal documentaries, and filmmakers in them, filmmakers reflecting on what they’re doing by making this film. I think that’s something that increasingly —

CHRIS NEUMER: Sort of like you and Stevie?

STEVE JAMES: Yeah.

CHRIS NEUMER: You got a lot of, I don’t want to say guff, but you got a lot of criticism on both sides for that maneuver.

STEVE JAMES: Yes, I think for some people it worked, and for other people it most decidedly did not. And like with Stevie, I don’t regret at all putting that in the film.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, you make people think, and that’s not a bad thing.

STEVE JAMES: Right and I think the people who got it basically said that. Otherwise, it’s just a portrait of this kid, and it raises all those questions. That seemed like a film that organically, I needed to deal with those things within my film. You never see me, and I shouldn’t say never, but I doubt you’ll ever see me in another one of my films, because it’s not the kind of filmmaker I am, but in that film it seemed like the only honest way to make it. But anyways, I do think those issues of self-reflectivity, or whatever, seem more viable and important today than they used to in the mainstream. They’ve always been a part of experimental film, but as to what the next frontier is, I don’t know. What I hope doesn’t happen is that documentaries become so caught up that our expectations of documentaries being commercial and entertaining don’t prevent a lot of really interesting and challenging work from getting out there, and being made because it’s not entertaining enough, it’s not funny enough. You know it’s great to have this breakthrough of documentaries, that documentaries can be commercial, that they can attract an audience, that documentaries are not medicine. That’s a great breakthrough, but I don’t want it to become the only thing that they become.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, as long as you have Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary running around out there, I don’t think you need to worry about that.

STEVE JAMES: No, that’s true, but I think that we are entering a phase in documentary in the public eye which it’s never had before, it’s never had this kind of support and I hope you’re right, but I think there is always that danger in a market-driven economy and business like this, that once the people who distribute documentaries have seen that documentaries can make a lot of money, can make decent money, that they’ll be less likely to take chances on things that are not commercial. Think about all the indie-dramatic films, I don’t know, what’s happened to the indie-dramatic films? You think the work is as strong as it was ten years ago? I don’t know that it is.

CHRIS NEUMER: It’s tough, because my knowledge of film ten years ago was, you know, I was a freshman in college, what I was watching back then, I mean, a good-looking girl at that point in time was enough for me to be like, "Hey, all right!" But five years ago, I don’t know, it’s an interesting question to think about, I’ll give it that.

STEVE JAMES: Yeah, I mean I’m not trying to be a doomsayer or anything, I think it’s great what’s happened with documentaries, I just hope that this explosion is not a shift in an emphasis of what documentaries should be, just more the sense that there’s room for a lot more, that the commercial demands don’t drive everything.

Chris Neumer